Summer Happenings...

We have had a great, exciting summer! First of all, we introduced our third little "Kittredge Kind" into the world on May 18th and just like my Grandpa always says about his great grandkids, she is definitely "a dandy"!!

The kids got lots of practice planting seeds indoors in over 60 seed starter cells, and out side in our garden. They also got to learn about pollination and see the pollinators about their work once the flowers were in bloom. We learned about the boy parts of a flower (the anthers with pollen) and the girl parts (the stigma). And THEN they even got to eat the "fruits of their labor". God is truly a master scientist.

The kids also got first hand learning experiences on raising chickens, which was and is truly a lot of fun!

***Notice in this picture Liam has chicken nugget in his little bowl. : ( Poor chickens have a hard life.

Also, we joined the summer reading program and logged over 4 hours of reading (actually, I forgot to log our times a lot so we clocked in more than this, just no one was writing it down). The kids got to "buy" toys with their reading beads at the local library "summer reading program" store.

Savannah practiced her penmanship through the summer, working on lower case mostly now, and we've been reading lots of ABC books for Liam's letter recognition, he's doing great, he just does not like the alphabet song. He doesn't like to sing much, unless it's a song from Air1 FM and he's in the backseat of the van, alone.

We've used pinto beans as mathematical manipulatives and baked many breads, biscuits, cookies and cakes from scratch, which gets the kids used to various kinds of measurements and the physical changes that occur when they add different ingredients to what we are making.

We've also played, quite literally, countless games, including Uno (color and number recognition), Candyland (color recognition and not much else :), Memory Match (cognitive thinking skills, we love these games), Checkers, Bingo, Rumicube (number and order practice), Hullabaloo (color, shape and organizational skills are involved) and the kids have made up numerous games of their own, though most of them involve wrestling and end up with someone hurt and screaming.

We've done numerous other things and the kids have encountered many new learning experiences in which we will not have been aware of. But most of all, they played...

and played...

and played...